Nimble News

Just four and a half years after shipping its first Adaptive Flash platform, Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL), the flash storage solutions company, today announced that more than 5,000 customers worldwide have adopted the Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash platform. Achieving this significant milestone underscores the company’s vision to deliver the industry’s most efficient flash storage platform.

Since shipping the first CS-Series array in 2010, Nimble has established a strong track record for delivering innovation. In the first half of 2014 the company introduced its high-end CS700 platform and All Flash Shelf as part of the Adaptive Flash platform, effectively addressing all-flash workloads as well as petabyte-scale deployments within a single platform. In the second half of the year the company refreshed its entire platform portfolio to increase price-performance by more than 50 percent. The most significant advance in product innovation came with the early release of Fibre Channel functionality across the CS-Series arrays enabling Nimble to address enterprise-wide storage requirements and quadruple the addressable market the company is able to serve.

“Surpassing the 5,000th customer milestone so quickly represents the collective commitment to excellence of our dedicated and passionate employees. I want to thank our entire organization, as well as our customers and partners,” said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO, Nimble Storage. “The Nimble Adaptive Flash platform underscores the comprehensive nature of our approach to leveraging the three major disruptive changes in the storage market: flash, cloud, and converged infrastructure. We are uniquely positioned to leverage these architectural changes and emerge as the market leader. Our value proposition to enterprises and cloud service providers as a platform that can consolidate enterprise-wide workloads cost-effectively, with vastly better performance, superior data protection and radically lower complexity will enable us to continue to accelerate our high win rates against the leading incumbent platforms.”

Flash certainly has disruptive potential in the data center, but do you really need to pay for flash-only storage, when you could realize better price-performance and capacity with the Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash platform?

That’s a crucial strategic question facing enterprise storage buyers today, who must support more and more performance-intensive applications and workloads – all while containing costs and complexity.

To help answer that question, Nimble is issuing an Adaptive Flash Challenge: If your organization is actively evaluating all-flash storage systems, simply run a side-by-side comparison with the Adaptive Flash platform, and we’ll send you a new Apple Watch just for participating.

How can we be so confident? It’s a question of perception versus reality. At first glance, it looks like flash-only storage is well suited to performance-intensive environments, even though it’s more expensive than solutions that leverage both flash and disk. But in real-world enterprise IT organizations, customers report that Nimble Adaptive Flash arrays consistently match or outperform flash-only systems, while offering a level of flexibility that flash-only solutions simply cannot match.

That flexibility is important:

You gain the speed of all-flash storage (up to 500K IOPS, with sub-millisecond latency), but still have petabytes of scalable capacity.

All-flash and “hybrid” workloads are consolidated on a single platform, that provides non-disruptive and independent scaling of performance and capacity.

All your flash storage – up to 160TBs – is available to accelerate apps, rather than being wasted on snapshots, RAID overhead, or over-provisioning.

Nimble’s built-in InfoSight™ analytics engine optimizes your storage resources, telling you exactly how much flash is needed to best support all your applications.

Are you willing to take on this challenge? Call (800) 663-5523 and let us guide you through this process.

The Nimble platform has been adopted by cloud service providers, and mid-sized and Fortune 500 companies across a wide range of industries. These customers rely on a mix of applications, and run a variety of workloads and then there is their superior customer experience.

Nimble believes flash will upend traditional disk-based architectures, and that cloud-based storage management will eventually replace current approaches to storage management.

Flexible scaling of storage resources to satisfy the changing demands of business-critical applications

Five times greater performance and capacity density than legacy storage systems

Up to a 75% reduction in data footprint, and a 10x reduction in datacenter rack space

Non-disruptive and independent scaling of performance and capacity, within a single array or a cluster

The CS210 and CS215 provide value and performance for small to medium-sized IT organizations or remote offices, for workloads such as Microsoft Exchange and VDI.

The CS300 is ideal for midsize IT organizations or distributed sites of larger organizations. It offers the best capacity per $ for workloads like Microsoft applications, VDI, or virtual server consolidation. The CS300 delivers 1.6x more IOPS than the CS215.

The CS500 offers advanced performance for larger-scale deployments or IO-intensive workloads, like larger-scale VDI, and Oracle or SQL Server databases, and provides the best performance and IOPS per $. The CS500 achieves 5x the performance of the CS215.

The CS700 is designed for consolidating multiple large-scale critical applications with aggressive performance demands. It delivers approximately 7x the IOPS of the CS215.

Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL), the flash storage solutions company, is redefining the storage market by enabling enterprises to meet performance and capacity requirements for any workload in virtualized datacenters and cloud environments. Nimble Storage’s Adaptive Flash platform provides the performance of flash-only arrays and the capacity of hybrid arrays with the introduction of the CS700 Series arrays and All-Flash Shelf delivering up to 500,000 IOPS, 64 terabytes (TBs) of flash, and a petabyte of capacity. By minimizing performance and capacity tradeoffs, Nimble’s Adaptive Flash platform enables the consolidation of all workloads and eliminates storage silos.

CIOs have struggled to accommodate storage infrastructure quickly and cost effectively to handle unpredictable data growth and to meet changing requirements. As such, they have been forced to create storage silos to meet service level agreements for various types of applications that require different levels of performance and capacity. Nimble’s Adaptive Flash platform dynamically and intelligently allocates storage resources to meet diverse and stringent application demands on a single platform.

Adaptive Flash is based on CASL™, Nimble’s patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout architecture, and InfoSight™, the company’s automated cloud-based management and support system. The platform is engineered to provide organizations with the highest levels of performance efficiently. Along with integrated data protection and predictive support, enterprise customers can deploy confidently and seamlessly scale their storage infrastructure as their business grows.

The new CS700 Series array can handle a variety of performance-intensive enterprise workloads, such as large-scale VDI deployments and high transaction-volume databases, as well as other performance intensive server virtualization workloads such as Microsoft Exchange. The new All-Flash Shelf provides the flexibility to scale flash gradually up to 16 TBs per node, or 64 TBs in a 4-node scale-out cluster, delivering industry leading flash densities. These new products are able to deliver leading performance by leveraging CASL, a CPU-driven architecture that eliminates the dependence on disk spindles.

Organizations are forced to overprovision flash for performance-centric applications, incurring significant costs with overprovisioning and other overheads. Though performance-intensive applications benefit from residing on flash, enterprises are burdened with overheads associated with maintaining the entire working sets within a flash-only environment. Nimble’s Adaptive Flash platform leverages InfoSight to recommend the exact amount of resources required as application demands change within an enterprise, while Nimble’s scale-to-fit approach allows non-disruptive addition of resources, thus avoiding over provisioning, under-utilization, and increased costs.

CASL’s SSD read cache is much more efficient and responsive than tiered flash.

Nimble typically requires only one-third to one-fifth of the hardware of to that of the competitors to deliver the same or better performance and capacity.

Add on highly efficient snapshots and replication, plus the ability to independently (and non-disruptively) scale performance and capacity, and you start to see why Nimble have gained such momentum in the market.